I don't disagree. But I do disagree with the post in LGM that the Revolution was fought to protect slavery.
The English Black Militia did motivate white Southerners to join the cause for freedom from England... I would say freeing the slave brought the southern states firmly into the cause...
John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, formed what he termed “Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment” in the fall of 1775 from the several hundred slaves who escaped their servitude to join him, as he fled Williamsburg to organize a small army … Read MoreLord Dunmore’s...
www.blackpast.org
snip...
John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the last royal governor of
Virginia, formed what he termed “Lord Dunmore’s
Ethiopian Regiment” in the fall of 1775 from the several hundred slaves who escaped their servitude to join him, as he fled Williamsburg to organize a small army of loyalists and
British soldiers on the coast near Norfolk. In November, Dunmore published a
proclamation promising freedom to servants and slaves able to bear arms, and enough joined him
to make up half of the force that first routed the Virginia militia at Kemp’s Landing and then, in December, suffered a devastating defeat at Great Bridge on the Elizabeth River. By then, Dunmore reported to London, that nearly three hundred men of the Ethiopian Regiment were clad in uniforms embroidered with the
provocative words “liberty to slaves.”
Patriot writers reacted with fear and fury to the threat posed by this first systematic freeing and arming of the South’s black labor force.
snip...
The formation of Dunmore’s Regiment marked a significant turn in both British policy and American race relations for its members were the first of an estimated 12,000 blacks who served with British forces in North America during the Revolutionary War. Their reception by the British was one factor that prompted the Continental Congress, by 1777, to rescind its November 1775 declaration that blacks were ineligible to serve in the Continental Army, and led to the first significant enrolments of free blacks and then slaves in the patriot forces.